The Human Condition
by glitterburn
Summary: Jack/Englehorn. “We all live in a cage of our own making, captain. And besides, when I’m writing, I don’t really notice anything that goes on around me.”


**The Human Condition**

It was remarkable how quickly one adjusted to life at sea, Jack thought. It was remarkable how one could adapt to anything, given time and the right inclination.

Of course, the pitch and toss of the ship through the waves was tempered by where he sat, safe in the hold, safe in a cage. For the first few days on board he'd spent some time topside and had felt nauseated by the continual shifting of the horizon. With nothing to focus on, life became very wobbly.

The crew, he'd noticed, tended to avoid standing on one side or other of the ship. They stood square in the centre, right over the keel. Like standing in the middle of a seesaw, the centre of balance was always going to be the most stable place.

The only place where Jack felt stable was seated in front of his typewriter. Down in the hold, amongst the lingering warm, fuzzed memory-scent of captive animals, where the darkness was shadowed rather than total, the movement of the ship and the sound of the waves was more of an afterthought. He could hide there, in the ship's belly, curled up like a child with his typewriter and a stack of paper.

The fact that his room was an animal cage did not bother him. In fact, he quite liked it. He'd turned it into a den, and enjoyed the irony of literally locking himself away in order to finish a scene. Unlike a prisoner, though, Jack had visitors: Carl, demanding the next sequence for filming; Ann, so delicate and lovely in the filth of the surroundings; Mr Hayes, wandering down to discuss Conrad and Melville with greater understanding than any high school teacher.

Jimmy would come into the hold, too, his face pinched with bravado. He'd stowed away once, in these cages. Jack wondered if the lad despised him for making so free with the place that had saved him.

As he sat and pecked half-heartedly at a spirited piece of dialogue between his two leads, Jack heard a sound. He listened for a moment, hearing not the uncertain footsteps of the movie personnel but the easy, swinging gait of one used to walking over the troughs of the ocean.

When he looked up, he saw the tall, rangy figure of the captain come into view. Englehorn strode between the cages and came to a halt directly in front of his home. His thumbs were tucked into his trouser pockets, but he still managed to maintain a dignified bearing. Beneath the weird, subterranean flicker of the lamps, Jack could see Englehorn's expression only in flashes of light amongst the darkness.

On his first night on the ship, Jack had appropriated a storm lantern and set it on the packing crate beside the typewriter. Usually he kept the flame turned down low – he liked the atmosphere created by the suggestion of light – but now he turned it up, blinking at the flare. The glitter of the chrome on the typewriter made him wince slightly, and so he turned his head, shading his face with one hand, and gazed at Englehorn.

Most men would start a conversation with a bland piece of dialogue: some observation on the weather or the latest news or how the baseball league was going. In Jack's experience, men only ever started a conversation direct to the topic on their minds if they were in a serialised novel or if they were on the stage.

Captain Englehorn was in neither, even if the situation in which they found themselves was as far-fetched as some of the twenty-cent purple prose novels Jack occasionally felt compelled to buy and read in one single sitting. In fact, Jack thought as he waited for the captain to speak, Englehorn was a pulp-fiction stereotype: strong, brooding, and capable; his looks emphasised by his German accent with its stilted, sparing command of English...

Jack looked at him quizzically. After a moment, he relaxed the 'can-I-help-you' expression from his face, and just returned Englehorn's gaze. A moment longer, and enquiry became a mild paranoia. He felt like an animal in a zoo, or worse – an animal cornered by a hunter.

Jack exhaled slowly and lowered his head, his fingers moving down to rest on the keys. He typed a word – _elevation_ – even though it had no place in the script, simply because it was the first word to come to mind. He just needed to hear the sound of the keys, that soothing, hypnotic clatter…

"It suits you here."

Jack stopped typing and looked up, startled. "What?"

"It suits you here."

Englehorn's voice was gruff, as tarred as old rope from years of shouting orders along a rain-lashed deck combined with smoking too much rough-cut tobacco and drinking too much rotgut whiskey.

Jack wasn't sure how to respond. It had been a statement rather than a question, and although it was a casual observation, it carried more weight than any random comment from a man on the corner of a Brooklyn street. He hesitated before he made his reply, wondering what one of his characters would say should this little _tête-à-tête_ be on the stage.

All he could come up with was, "Well, it's warm and dry. And quiet. Mostly."

The captain swayed forwards with the ship's motion to take hold of the bars, his arms braced as he held himself there. He stared intently at Jack, and said, "But you're in a cage."

"Yes." Jack looked down at his workspace. "For my safety."

"There are other safe places on this ship," Englehorn said.

Jack tried to smile. "This one is just fine. Thank you."

"It cannot be comfortable, living in a cage."

"We all live in a cage of our own making, captain. And besides, when I'm writing, I don't really notice anything that goes on around me."

Englehorn pressed his face so close to the bars that Jack felt disturbed and had to turn away. "So the smell – it doesn't bother you?"

"No more than cheap perfume on my pillow."

Englehorn snorted. "You're being funny."

Jack looked up at him again. "I am?"

"Yes." The captain shifted position, taking his hands from the bars of Jack's cage and settling himself back against the wall opposite. "Tell me about this writing you're doing."

Jack had allowed his gaze to return to the battered sheet of paper that was half-rolled through the teeth of the machine. The paper was cheap, dime-store stuff – too much pulp and not enough smooth surface. He liked to write the draft of his plays on paper like this, because he knew the final piece would be typed out on beautiful, clean sheets. He liked the contrast between the dross and the perfect, finished piece; but he knew that with this movie script, dross was all it would ever be, no matter how hard he worked on it.

Pulpy sheets tended to smear whenever a key hit a thick speckle of wood. The ink never soaked in quick enough, so that if he pulled the paper free of the typewriter, the words would smear as if rain had fallen on them, or tears, or sweat.

The sheet in the typewriter hung limp in the jaws of the machine. Black keystrokes marched across it, some letters darker, inkier, than others. Jack realised that Englehorn was looking at the paper, and he felt a sudden urge to rip the sheet from the typewriter and hide what was written there.

The captain didn't seem to be interested in what Jack had written. He seemed more concerned with the way the sheet furled inwards at the edges. He nodded towards it, and asked, "The paper. Is it always like that?"

Jack shrugged. "Pretty much. I guess the humidity doesn't help."

"It's hotter in Singapore."

"So I hear. But they've got typewriters, too, and newspapers, even if they don't have stage plays…"

Englehorn made a sound halfway between a laugh and a cough. "Oh, they've got stage shows all right. You haven't seen anything yet."

"Well," Jack said, feeling slightly flustered and very gauche, "there is a distinction between a stage play and a stage show."

"Of course there is." Englehorn seemed more amused by Jack's discomfort than he was in their conversation. "Go on. Tell me about the writing. Why do you do it?"

Jack sat back in his makeshift chair and gave him a puzzled look. "Why do I do this?" he asked, gesturing to the piles of foolscap beside the typewriter. "Because Carl's an old friend – although I use that term loosely, after this little stunt – and, well, it pays the bills."

"So you write because you must. Because you cannot do anything else."

"No, no." Jack sighed and rubbed his forehead tiredly, gathering his thoughts. "In a way, yes. But you made it sound so… mercenary."

Englehorn smiled. "There is nothing wrong with making money."

"No, there's not. But that's not why I do this."

"Then why?"

Jack gnawed on his thumb and looked up through the bars at the captain. Englehorn's interest seemed genuine; or at least his confusion was real enough. He thought some more, sorting through all the usual reasons he gave out to people whenever they asked him why he wrote, why he wrote plays, why he wrote the kind of plays that he wrote…

"The human condition interests me," he said at last. "I guess writing captures the human condition."

Englehorn gave him a blank look, and then he snorted. "The hell it does! What do you really do with them, with your characters? Like with Miss Darrow and that damn fool Baxter? Is this movie really about the human condition?"

Jack opened and closed his mouth like a fish. "Yes," he said. "In a way."

"But whose condition are you discussing?" The captain looked faintly contemptuous now. "Miss Darrow's?"

Jack blushed. "That was uncalled for."

"I just want to know why you do it."

"Why? What's your interest?"

Englehorn shrugged. "I just want to know. It's a long way to Singapore and back again. I like to learn new things. Maybe I have developed an interest in the human condition."

Jack made a sound at the back of his throat, halfway between amusement and disgust. "When I write," he said slowly, "I discuss the human condition within us all."

It sounded pompous, and he knew it. So did Englehorn, who just gazed at him.

"When you write," the captain said, equally as slowly, "you write about your own condition, and then you apply it to everybody else."

Jack stared at him, shock lighting in his belly and buzzing in his head at the revelation. He shook his head, even though the words that came out of his mouth belied the action.

"Yes," he said softly. "Yes, you're right. That's what I do."

"So why do you write?"

Jack paused, and then admitted, "To feel safe."

"That's why it suits you here," Englehorn said, touching the bars of the cage. "That's why I put you here. Because I knew how you were."

"And you?" Jack asked, suddenly brave. "What do you do?"

Englehorn smiled briefly. "I do many things," he said, "but I do not write."

"No. You hunt," Jack said. "That's what a man does, isn't it? A real man hunts. That's surely the epitome of living the human condition! Anyway," he added, feeling a little exposed after all that, and desperate to lighten the mood, "I never learned how to hunt. I just know how to write, and what the hell else can I do while we're stuck in the middle of – of the Pacific?"

"You could fish."

"Fish?" Jack stared at Englehorn as if he'd made an obscene suggestion; and then he nodded, and said again in a different tone of voice, "Fish. Yes. Of course."

"Just a suggestion."

"Do you fish, Captain Englehorn?"

"Sometimes. If the prize is worth catching."

"Oh, so no little tiddlers for you, then. No halibut or cod or – or…" Jack was suddenly aware that he knew absolutely nothing about fish, and so he finished lamely, "No mackerel."

Englehorn laughed out loud. "Mackerel? No, I do not catch that. Cod, yes – my men have nets; we trawl for some fish. A lot we catch by accident, when we look for the bigger creatures."

"Bigger…?" Jack hunched down over the typewriter, his fingers reaching out almost of their own volition. He wanted to record this. Sea creatures! Why not? Carl would probably love something big and monstrous to break the monotony of what was fast becoming a witty but oh-so-standard love story. The pads of his fingers touched the keys. "What kind of bigger creatures?"

"Giant octopus," Englehorn said. "Huge squid. They live in the big ocean trenches. We see them sometimes. There are men who'd pay hundreds of dollars for these animals. Even dead, they're valuable."

"How big?" Jack asked, only half-listening as he tapped away.

"As big as this ship. Bigger."

There was a sound nearby, as if something had suddenly woken in one of the adjacent cages. Suddenly, Jack could smell the hot stink of a beast.

He started, and put his hands protectively over the typewriter keys.

Englehorn laughed again. "It's a challenge. Getting the animals," and he gestured around the hold at the cages. "It was difficult at first, but once you know what you're doing, and if you never take it for granted, then it's easy."

"You knock them out," Jack said, remembering the jars of chloroform he'd seen when he first came on board the ship.

"Not all of them. Why do you think I have so much of the stuff left? I prefer to catch my animals by cunning, with skill. But these days the collectors don't like that. They want animals in perfect condition, not those scarred from fighting. They want humane entrapments, not a battle of wits between man and beast…"

Englehorn sounded almost wistful. His voice tailed off, and he stared into the twilight of the hold.

"Then why do you still do it?"

The captain gave him a strange look. "In the hope that, one day, I will find something worthy. Something that will test me."

Jack sat forwards, fascinated. "And you've never found anything like that?"

Englehorn slouched against the wall and gave him an unreadable look. "Most of the time, when we catch these animals, when we put them in the cage… it's as if the life goes out of them. They might rage and fight for a while, but then they lose their soul. Being caged does that to an animal."

Jack looked back at him, and was silent.

Englehorn smiled and came closer. "I thought, until recently, that it did that to a man, too. That it was a part of the human condition." He ran a hand down the bars of Jack's cage, a lingering caress; and he said, "But now I know I was wrong."

**end**


End file.
